Are you a busy veterinary professional looking to use social media to support your practice growth and to communicate with your clients? This presentation provides tips and tricks to help you succeed.

1. Minimal time, maximum results:
Make social media work for you

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Social media in your practice
How many of you work at a
practice that uses one social
media channel?
Two?
Are you considering adding
more to the mix?

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What are your goals?
• Stay in touch with your existing
customers.
• Find new customers.
• Share educational information.
• Share information about your clinic’s
charitable work and role in your
community.

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What channels should I be using?
o While there are multiple channels that can
help you meet your needs, today we’re
going to focus on two of them:
• Facebook
• Instagram

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Facebook
• It’s your social media
home base
• It’s the most-used
social media platform
in the world
• SEO

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Facebook posting tips
When to post
o When it’s worthwhile
How often to post
• No more than 3x/week

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Tricks to beat Facebook’s algorithm
Limit use of links
• There’s been a backlash against “news” on
Facebook and one way they may be fighting
back is to deprioritize links.
Ask questions
• The algorithm favors “meaningful interactions” –
comments and shares.
Encourage clients to follow your page
• If your content is important to them, then they
won’t want to miss your posts.

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Instagram posting tips
When to post
Monitor your own engagement and make
adjustments based on your audience
preferences.
How often to post:
If you have more to share in a day,
combine multiple images into one post,
or try an Instagram Story.

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Tricks to increase engagement on Instagram
Tag your location
Posts with locations get
79% more engagement.
Put your people
in your posts
Posts with faces get
38% more likes.
Speak in emoji
50% of captions and
comments on Instagram
contain an emoji.

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Before launching a new channel:
Resources:
• How much time is it going to take
you to keep this social media
channel updated?
• You’ll want to post at least once
per week.
Social care: 5 in 6 inquiries on social
media go unanswered. Yikes!

12. Social Media Ads

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There’s no such thing as a free lunch … or social media channel

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Increase your social media reach with ads
Start by: Keeping an eye on your
posts, and promote one that
performs better than your average.
Then: Spend $5 on an ad. You don’t
need to make a huge investment.
Be strategic: You don’t need to
boost all of your posts.

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When to boost
• You want more of your current
followers to see your posts
• You want people who don’t follow
you to see your post
• You’re trying to work around
an algorithm update
• You want to promote a service or offer
• You don’t have time to set up an
ad campaign

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How to target a paid post on Facebook

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Demographics for targeting posts

18. Online Reviews

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Help! Someone left a negative review.

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Hug your haters
Tips:
• Regularly monitor the
websites where people
are most likely going to leave
reviews.
• Develop approved responses
ahead of time so that you
aren’t starting from scratch
every time you need to
respond.
• Move the conversation offline
as quickly as possible.

21. Questions?
Find this presentation
and contact details at:
idexx.com/vmx